Thursday, May 25, 2017

Nice introduction to William Blake's debt to Swedenborg

“The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men the engraver’s apprentice was to grow up the likest to Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional temperament and endowment was so: in faculty for theosophic dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and in matter of fact hold of spiritual things. To savant and to artist alike, while yet on earth, the Heavens were opened.” (Life of William Blake, Alexander Gilchrist, p. 15)